At Nick’s Garden Center and Farm Market in Aurora, it takes some searching to find the few San Pedro cacti for sale inside of the sprawling greenhouse. On Tuesday afternoon, fresh Christmas wreathes ...

I first learned about it while broadcasting at KVMR-FM, a hippie-staffed talk and music station that catered to alternative lifestyle folks in the northern Sierra Nevada. One guy in the office ...

Peyote is a small, spineless, button-shaped cactus capable of producing hallucinatory effects upon ingestion. While there have been movements in recent years to protect indigenous peoples’ religious ...

In this corner of southern Texas, the plump cacti seem to pop out of arid dust and cracked earth, like magic dumplings. It’s only here and in northern Mexico that the bluish-green peyote plant can be ...

Andres Carillo, a Huichol Indian shaman, uses the peyote plant to create these artworks depicting the visions he has after consuming the cactus. The Huichol have asked the Mexican government to ...

With the publication of Aldous Huxley’s mescaline-induced musings in “The Doors of Perception” in 1954, the spiritual and mystical groundwork for the psychedelic revolution of the following decade was ...

Prudence Gibson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond ...

Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic. By Mike Jay.Yale University Press; 304 pages; $26 and £18.99. MESCALINE IS THE drug that launched the modern fascination with hallucinogens. It is ...

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